FidoNet (the dial-up era)

» see fidonet.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

fidonet was a network made out of phone bills. that is not a figure of speech. there was no backbone anybody paid for centrally and no shared infrastructure to speak of. there was a list of machines with modems attached, each one with a phone number next to it, and an agreement that every night each of them would call the next one and pass the mail along.

tom jennings wrote the Fido bulletin board software in 1984 in san francisco. john madill was running a copy in baltimore. the two of them bolted on a piece that let one machine call the other after hours and drop off messages, and once a third machine joined that arrangement it stopped being a link and became a network. by april 1993 the nodelist carried over 20,000 systems. the mid 90s peak sat somewhere near 39,000, with a user count nobody could count properly but everyone put in the millions.

the part that made it feel like the internet was echomail, added by jeff rush in february 1986. private mail between two people was one thing. echomail was public conferences, propagated node to node across the whole map, so an argument started on a board in one country turned up on a board in another a day or two later. it behaved almost exactly like usenet, and it ran on nothing but modems and the willingness of a few thousand hobbyists to pay for the calls.

i came online in 1998, on a 33.6k modem in turkey, and went straight onto the internet without ever dialing a board. by then this was already finished. the specific thing that made fidonet work was also the thing my phone line trained me to avoid, because every minute cost money and the modem went down the second the thing i came for was done. somebody voluntarily placing a long-distance call at four in the morning, every night, to carry other people's mail for free was not an idea my side of the world was arranged to produce.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ four in the morning ~

zone mail hour was the rule that held it together. for one hour a day every node had to keep at least one line free and answering, so anything queued for it could be delivered. the hour was originally set at four in the morning, and that was not about traffic. it was about long-distance rates. the routing schedule of a worldwide network was designed around when the phone company charged less.

the nodelist went out weekly, a plain text file listing every system's name and the number to reach it. you did not look an address up, you downloaded the whole map and your software read it. addressing ran zone:net/node, six zones cut roughly by continent. it is a completely sane design that happens to be unreadable to anyone who learned networking after DNS.

~ the two rules ~

policy 4, the governing document, is one of the strangest constitutions any network has ever had. under the procedural detail it comes down to two rules: do not be excessively annoying, and do not be too easily annoyed. the document admits outright that excessively annoying cannot be defined, and hands the judgment to the coordinators on the grounds that they will know it when they see it.

it worked for a decade, and that is the part worth sitting with. tens of thousands of independently owned machines, no company behind it and no contracts anywhere, governed by a written agreement about not being a nuisance. every moderation policy written since has been longer, and none of them has been more honest about what it is actually doing.

~ the long tail ~

nothing shut fidonet down. from the middle of 1995 cheap internet accounts spread and the arithmetic fell apart, because once any machine on earth costs the same to reach, a store-and-forward net built to dodge distance has nothing left to sell. the nodelist thinned year after year. by 2013 it was down around 2,500 systems.

it is still there. a couple of thousand nodes, the weekly nodelist still going out, echomail conferences still propagating, most of it now carried over tcp/ip instead of modems. the network survived and its reason for existing did not, which puts it in the same drawer as usenet: alive in the technical sense, finished as the thing it was.

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